Appearing each Wednesday, this Cloud News Report will compile our top three favorite cloud news stories from the past week.

1. Cloud computing expected to grow rapidly in health care

This article focuses in on the health care community’s expected growth rate in terms of cloud usage over the next five years. In this American Medical News article by Emily Berry, she details a report published by Dallas-based consulting and forecasting firm MarketsandMarkets which predicts a substantial growth through 2017 as health care organizations are expected to provide more while spending less, and cloud can be a tool to aide in that balance.

Many who work closely with cloud technology will tell you it has a distinct impact on the day-to-day roles and skills of today’s IT professionals. In this blog post Joe McKendrick breaks down CompTIA’s recent study regarding how skillsets are evolving in relation to cloud.

McKendrick covers the study’s analytics related to skills and roles companies have added, employee attrition in relation to cloud adoption and action IT managers are taking to build these new skills. This is a great overview of the changing IT professional landscape in relation to cloud.

We’d be remiss not to post the biggest VMware story of the week, their acquisition of Nicira this week. The news is still fresh out of the oven and any number of stories published are providing varying details of the deal as it unfolds publicly, this article is a concise overview, complete with a diagram graphic, that covers a potential look at VMware’s quickly evolving future value proposition.